Screengrab: YouTube
Caity Simmers estimates that a quarter of the trash she picks up on the beach is just plain old cigarette butts. According to Professor of Public Health and Waste Expert, Tom Novotny, they are the single-most picked up item in beach and urban cleanups. He says that’s been true for the past 30 years.
“There are millions, and billions, and trillions of cigarettes every year dumped into the environment,” he says. “What you’re picking up mostly is the filter,” which contains plastics and chemicals that are toxic to the environment.
Novotny once ran an experiment by placing those single, discarded filters into a liter of water with several small fish. Half of those fish died from the toxic chemicals. The experiment was simple, straightforward, and it showed that the butts we pick up off beaches or sometimes even see floating around in the lineup aren’t just annoying trash, they’re harmful pollutants that change the makeup of the ocean environment when you consider just how many find their way into our waterways — enough of them to become the most common piece of ocean trash. For context, the Ocean Conservancy reported in 2018 that 2,412,151 cigarette butts were collected worldwide in the year prior. That number was up from the 1,863,838 butts collected around the world in 2016.
With nearly 2.5 million of those things collected in 2018 alone, it’s easy to see then how one might be able to get their hands on about 4,000 cigarette butts at a time to build…a surfboard. That’s always been the story of the Cigarette Surfboard, which two friends from California started building years ago as a symbol for ocean conservation. That story certainly resonates with Simmers.
“People that live around the ocean have more of a responsibility,” she says. “They’re the ones who utilize the ocean so they should take care of it more. (And) if they see the impact of it — all of (the cigarettes) together — then maybe they’ll realize…”
